


You taste like black honey

by Baryshnikov



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Dark Ginny Weasley, Dark Harry Potter, F/M, Falling In Love, M/M, Manipulation, Manipulative Tom Riddle, Soul merging, True Love, Twisted love, a little dark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-17
Updated: 2019-07-17
Packaged: 2020-06-30 09:55:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19850734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Baryshnikov/pseuds/Baryshnikov
Summary: Tom doesn't care for them, except he does.His Harry and his Ginevra.Perhaps this is love.





	You taste like black honey

**Author's Note:**

> I’d like to apologise from the outset for this absolute abomination. I have no idea what it is supposed to be and was really just a product of me, writing, without any set goal, plot or particular aim in mind. So, it wanders, the tenses change, and stuff happens. I don’t even know, and I’m sorry it’s such a mess.

Perhaps this is love.

They are all just teenagers, but so is he, in a way. They are all teenagers who are afraid. Afraid of failure and disappoint, afraid of not being who they were destined to be. 

If Tom were someone else, he would care about the loneliness he sees in them, he would care about the desperation, he would care about the fear. But he does not care. Nor does he aid them, at least, not at first, because people who are longing are easier to mould. 

But with every word, it gets harder not to see the hurting. Harder to ignore the pain and the suffering that they subject themselves to over and over again. If only they could see that the world could be so much nicer if they just let him in. Let him lie so deep in their hearts and feast off their souls. If only they could have a taste of his nirvana, maybe they could understand how much _better_ their lives could be. It is somewhere between these conversations that Tom has with one of them every, single, night, he loses his heart 

It isn’t his fault.

They are just so _lovely_.

His Harry and his Ginevra. 

Though still, Tom refuses to say that he had fallen in love because love is not something that he can fall into. It is an emotion, a state, a mere presence, he cannot fall into it, and yet, he cannot help but wonder whether he, unintentionally, has. 

Whether, somehow, these pathetic little creatures have started to _mean_ something to him. 

Tom can certainly feel the dependence, the reliance that Harry has on him. How he leans further and further into his grasp with such a free will that it is almost painful to take advantage. There is such a deep need in his words, such a curiosity, and such a sad naivety. Harry doesn’t understand that his story is already written for him, word for word. He does not get the choices he so craves, all he gets are lights in the woods; a path that he can pretend to have made himself, but has really been laid a long time before he was even born. 

Ginevra is different. 

Ginevra has a fire inside her, and sometimes it threatens to boil over. To arise as a great burning thing and consume all that she sees. Ginevra cries to him, her tears like needles pressing into his body when they hit the pages. 

They hurt him. 

The words sewing themselves into his skin as she cries for everything and everyone because she’s just a little girl in a very big world. Tom can’t help but want to comfort her, he tells himself that it is because he needs her, because she is his subordinate. 

But really, it’s because of something else. 

It’s because she matters, however insignificantly, and he’d forgotten what it was like to be wanted, to be needed, rather than just feared. People used to want him, need him; they’d have done anything to get beside him, and even more to taste him. Tom had plenty of memories, some far nicer than others, of what they did to get his attention: the magic, the smiles, the words. 

Sometimes he used to indulge them.

And sometimes when the world around him is so silent, Tom wishes that they want his attention too. He wishes that they crave and ache and hanker for him as small children do for sweets. There is a selfish part of him that wants them to want him so much. 

Sometimes, he thinks that Harry might just yearn for him. For there is something so pitiful in the need that permeates every single letter that he writes, and those letters hurt nearly as much as Ginevra’s bullet-tears. 

That need burrowing into his skin. 

That loneliness. 

That emptiness that burrows so deep it colours every tiny part of Harry. It mars his skin, digging into his flesh and wrapping itself around every tendon, leaching into his organs until it is such a bone-deep disease that it can never be removed. 

If Tom had not heard it and felt it, then he would not have believed that such wanting could exist. He would not have believed that someone could _need_ so desperately. 

Need reassurance. 

Need understanding. 

_Need love._

And, he’s starting to think, they both love him, in their own way.

His Harry and his Ginevra. 

They both call for him. And their minds buzz and hum with a vision that looks like him. He only knows because they tell him. They say with such childish innocence that they saw him in their dreams. He comes to them when they are alone and frightened; when they are scared of the bad things out in the world, the ones that _they_ are supposed to protect people from. 

Even though they’re only children themselves. 

They still believe that he just might be their saviour. 

And he can’t bring himself to deny them. 

Perhaps this is love. 

Or perhaps it’s narcissism in its prettiest form. 

It isn’t as though Ginevra doesn’t remind Tom of himself; of that cool calmness that people mistake for apathy when really it is a shield, an umbrella to protect herself from the unwarranted opinions that fall about her like rain. He and she are more alike than she cares to imagine. And Tom wishes that he could hold her hands when they are shaking hard enough to wreck her writing. He wishes he could get inside her head and soothe her, sew up those tears that are only getting wider.

But he can’t. 

_He just can’t._

He is stuck in these pages until she has cried enough tears fill him up. He’s trapped here until they _need_ him enough; until they _want_ him enough that he can start to feed off their wanting. That he can start to live through their need.

He will wait. 

And though Ginevra does not see herself in him, Harry does, _oh_ , Harry sees himself in every little part of Tom. In every failure and every worry and every dream, Tom is his mirror image. 

_His better._

The thing that he was striving for and away from. Harry is nothing more than a seashell caught in the tide, knocked back and forth between powers that he could never understand, between futures and pasts, all just as horrendous as the last. There is no safety and no sanctuary, for the second the swell reduces, and Harry is allowed to settle on the sand, does another wave come curling and he is tossed once again back to the ocean’s void. 

Tom wants to catch him in a net. 

Catch him and hold him.

Hold the both of them, until the storms that lay in their world have subsided and their hearts could rest with his, in peace. 

Perhaps this is love. 

Tom often wonders if Harry realises quite how much of himself, he is pouring out, how much loss, how much death, how much fear that just slops out of him every day. The pain of having it all trapped inside him must be unbearable. It must buzz in his head like a swarm of wasps, just buzzing and buzzing and buzzing. But under that buzzing bassline, beneath the noise of pain and suffering, there was so much want. So much need, for acceptance, for appreciation, for everything that everyone already thinks he has, but Harry can’t see. 

It’s heartbreaking, really.

To watch Harry flailing, begging silently for someone to save him, only to have everyone turn their backs and insist that he is not yet drowning. Tom is his only lifeguard. And Tom would be a liar if he said he didn’t know what a _reliance_ Harry has on him. 

He is his confidant. 

The only person in the world, except maybe Ginevra, to know that there is a permanent hurricane wreaking chaos between the straight lines that Harry presents to the world. 

It’s simply shattering to see someone so far gone. 

And to love them nonetheless.

Perhaps this is love.

Tom hopes that these feelings are the fault of love, for the alternatives are, unsavoury at best, and, sickening at worst. For, if this is not love, then, it had to be just a form of wretched desperation.

A projection of loneliness. 

Wretched loneliness that creeps along the widening spaces of his mind. He is just a memory trapped in a void with nothing to do and nothing to feel, so, he supposes it was inevitable that he would absorb the things that they feel, like the sponge he is becoming. 

So needy. 

So desperate for any feeling at all that he grasps at the nearest one, like drowning man clinging to an overhanging rock that will not hold his weight. 

And he is starting to show himself too much. 

Becoming transparent for their whims. 

But he can’t find it in him to care that he is showing himself too soon. Or that he is simply giving in and letting them see everything that he is, no matter how broken or horrific that image might have been. He has not looked at himself for a long time, and he is not sure whether the face he has is still as lovely as it once was, but it is the only one he has. 

He knows too that it is wrong to give up the high ground for them. 

An impulse that he should rise above. 

But it is just so compulsive being _needed_. 

The only thing that satiates the craving that is spreading so fast through him, is to please them. To comfort them. To give them everything that he hadn’t had. If Tom hadn’t known that that part of him existed, he would have said he was under duress, that someone had wrapped themselves around his mind and now was refusing to let go. But he’d met this side of him before. 

A long time ago. 

Though he thought he had stamped it out like you do a spreading fire, before it consumes all that it comes into contact with. He thought that he had dampened down that part until it was shrivelled and dying. 

But, apparently, he hadn’t. 

And now it spreads like a wildfire, curling itself around every inch of him until all he could feel was their own emotions; their loneliness and their desperation. 

And their hope. 

Their simple dreams of him.

For they do dream of him, and they tell him so, in the slow, sad words of teenagers reduced to pawns in someone else’s game. They want him to free them. They want him to show them the way out of this nightmare that their lives have become.

And he can show them something.

Even if it isn’t the fairy-tale ending they dreamed of when they were young. 

Perhaps this is love. 

The day he meets them he will never forget.

Ginevra was so much darker than he imagined her to be. She revelled in his praise and did not cry as often as she had done when she was just a little girl. Just looking at her told him that he had _splintered_ whatever good had ever been inside her. 

Fractured it. 

And pushed himself into the cracks. 

Though he cannot be held responsible for how she grabbed at every shard he offered and forced her fingers into the jagged opening just to touch at the burning remanences that he had left behind. 

She has fallen in love with him. 

Just as he has done with her. 

Though he is reluctant to admit it. And she may be too. For this is not the love that others would see. It may not be the love that her parents would have wished for her, but that does not stop it from being love. 

Who was to say what love was? 

Who was to define it?

For love is malleable and chameleonic, changing for each and every user. For the two of them, love is a synergy; parasitic and symbiotic. A sickness and a disease, spreading like mould across spoiling fruit, turning the solid to liquid, and the sweet to sweeter. 

As she looks upon him, and Tom can’t help but see himself in her eyes. The thing about her that he loves, is her obsession with the darkness that makes up his bones. She is simply fascinated by the things that everyone has told her are bad.

But no one’s ever told her why. 

He likes her because she is like him. His Ginevra. A perfect rarity that must be protected, even if it means indulging an obsession, even if obsessions are dangerous things. 

Perhaps this is love. 

Then again, perhaps it isn’t. 

Was love supposed to be as violent as this? Words with claws and her nails against his arms because there is a small part of her that’s still angry, a small part that believes he cannot deliver on his promises of perfection. 

A part that believes he’s there to exploit her. 

But it can’t be exploitation if it’s mutual. 

And Ginevra will abuse him just as much as he will abuse her. 

After all, she’s never been a quiet girl. 

She’s never been a good girl. 

She will abuse him with her words, spreading colours and shapes and violence, just linguist manifestations of all those feelings that she doesn’t know how to say. 

They will hurt. 

They will bite into his skin like rabid animals, but Tom will still come back every time. A masochist for the suffering because her anger is impressionable. Her anger is the only thing he can’t take away from her, and he doesn’t want to. 

For her anger is just so pretty. 

And it will take her a long time to learn that she can trust him. For he is the only one she will ever be able to trust. Everyone else is simply using her, everyone else doesn’t understand what it’s like to see the darkness and to see something beautiful as it is deadly. Ginevra, his Ginevra, is the only one who will ever see how _gorgeous_ the darkest parts of the world are. 

The ones that he will show her if she promises to trust him.

Perhaps this is love. 

Or perhaps love is supposed to be more like what Harry gives him. His lovely Harry. With those thoughtful stares and loud eyes even when his mouth says nothing. 

Harry is not aggressive. 

Harry is not violent. 

He is soft and simple. Intrigued by what he sees in Tom, drawn to it like a magnet to metal. He understands somewhere in his mind that there are great similarities between the two of them. He understands just how easy it is to step across the moral line painted by others. He sees the strings that history and fate have tied between them; he sees them and, once upon a time, he would have wanted to cut them, but now…

Now, he waits to see where they will lead. 

Where Ginevra has hardened edges and such sharp lines, Harry’s are slacker. He will not need a hammer and chisel to be sculpted into Tom’s image; he is much more…

More…

Organic. 

It will be like watering a flower and watching it bloom. Gentle words that act as rain, and the softest actions as light as the sun rays, and Harry will grow just as he wants him to. Showing him the darkness will not be like showing Ginevra. There’ll be no glitz and glamour. For Harry, the darkness will be a saviour, a final saviour; and with his gift, for the first time, Harry will be _truly_ free. 

And if Tom is careful, Harry will not fight it. 

Harry will barely know what is happening.

And that’s the way it needs to be.

For too much love too quick will scare him away, leave him frozen like a deer in headlights. Too terrified of what he is feeling to ever consider relieving it. If he is scared, Harry will shrink, curl himself into a ball and never let Tom get a taste of his heart. 

And that _cannot_ happen. 

Simply, the type of love that served Ginevra so well, would not work on Harry. Their love must softer, subtler; the scratching of nails down his cheek and slow kisses with his hands in his hair. 

Tom would not admit how much he wanted to do those simple things. 

Perhaps this is love. 

This disorientation. 

This confusion. 

This duality of need. 

Wanting to both be gentle, and to hurt them, like no one else ever could. For he holds their lives in his hands, their futures are not their own anymore, and he can do _whatever_ he wants to them. Any of the hateful things that his fingers have been itching to do for years, he can do to them. 

And yet…

The thing that he wants to do most is simply sink his teeth into them, to taste their skin, to do all but eat them, just to try and sate that emptiness that they themselves have created inside him. 

Once, back when this all began, he wanted to kill them. To end their lives as soon as they reached the point where they could touch. But he has grown up since then. 

Now, the last thing in the whole world that he wants to do, is kill them. They are too useful to be mere corpses in the earth; decomposed by the soil and eaten by the worms. They are far more valuable than that, and far too lovely. Dead people can’t give Tom the things that he doesn’t want to admit he wants but knows he does anyway. 

And it hurts. 

Hurts so much to know that there is weakness in his veins. 

That there is a hole that had always been there, widening and stretching and gaping empty in his stomach, and now, for the first time, it is finally being filled. And not just filled a little, but filled to the point of excess, the contents spilling over the edges, squirming through his body like maggots in a corpse. It is a gorgeous, sickening, feeling that must, simply must have some semblance of love in it, and now Tom can understand, just a little, why all his friends had been so giddy for it. This sort of high was overwhelming, a constant thrumming on the edge of his life, it aligns itself to the beating of his heart, until they both ring loud and cold in his head. 

He had called them all useless at the time, base and crass and tied to themselves.

But it turns out he is the same.

Though, not quite. 

This isn’t quite love. This is…

This is…

More of a hunger. 

A need that diffused right into his skin, the sort that he can’t get out no matter how much he scratches. Not that it is an unpleasant feeling, just an unsettling one. The warm, cloyingness that is just too good after being empty for so long. So unaware that the numbness that this hollow existence nurtured had been eating away at him. 

But now he had noticed. 

Now, Tom can feel nothing but the ache of emptiness whenever they don’t reply; when they do not come as they promised they would. It is a sort of bone-deep tremor that shivers under his skin, leaving his hands shaking like an addict, and his heart aching more than he thought possible. 

Perhaps this is love. 

Then comes the time when they can meet and they can touch properly, fingers on fingers, and bodies on bodies, instead of lapping up each other’s words. 

Ginevra is the first one he touches because she’s been waiting the longest. She’s made up of strong hard lines, from the straightness of her back to the set of her mouth; they are all straight, solid, lines. And when Tom smiles, she smiles back, raising her chin and tilting her head back, just the way that he does.

They both like what they see.

The fire and the fury inside each of them. The hatred at the people who’ve been playing them for fools for their whole lives, and the disgust at themselves for playing along to the tune, that seems too obvious now someone has pointed it out. 

He likes Ginevra more when she touches him. He likes her confidence, her individuality, her assurance that _he_ is something she wants. When she kisses him, Tom can feel the fire on her tongue and the rage in the back of her throat; there is a spiciness to her mouth and a determination in her fingers.

She wants him.

And Ginevra always gets the things she wants. 

Tom can feel the heat simmering off her, that grit that he would like to think he put there, but knows, deep down, was there long before he was inside her head. She’s not afraid. He is not something she thinks she needs to be afraid of, and she’s right.

The only thing Ginevra should be afraid of is herself. 

Of the things she’ll do to get what she wants. Though Tom will happily indulge her this time, and the next time, and the next time, because she’s such an addictive substance. So sharp on his tongue, twisting him from the inside, wringing him out like juice from a lemon. He’ll happily let her swallow him whole.

Harry cannot be more different. 

Harry is so nervous that it’s almost heart-wrenching. His fingers shake even before they’ve touched Tom’s skin and he chews on the inside of his mouth like it can offer an escape; like he can dig a hole out of here if he just chews for long enough. 

It’s rather sad. 

He is more careful with Harry. 

Just a hand in his hair, stroking the strands that stick up in all directions, just like he thought they would. Just a hand, following the line down from his ear to his jaw and down his neck. Tom can’t deny how much he wants to kiss him, to just touch him, run his fingers all over what he could have been. Feel the differences in their bodies that are simply so superficial they are hardly differences at all.

Even now, when he is only tracing a single knuckle down Harry’s cheek, he can feel how deeply they have become intertwined, their souls so intricated that Tom dares to hope they’ll never come apart. Harry must know the things he wants to do. He must be able to feel them burning in his stomach and tingling in his fingertips. The buzz must be infecting every fibre that sews them together for the three of them have been dancing around this conclusion for long enough, all three of them, just dancing, tiptoeing over the point again and again. 

Tom knows, just as they must, that this is a mess. A tangle of emotions and thoughts and feelings, none of which should have been allowed to grow, but all that have anyway. They are like wire poppies curling up from the ground, their roots jumbling together beneath the surface, and it is a simple fact that they are now too connected to ever be able to let go.

And if they can’t unhook themselves from each other, then they’ll just have to learn how to fit together. Learn how this snarling mesh of a connexion is going to flourish.

Because they are too far in now, to go back.

He, his Harry and his Ginevra.

Perhaps this _is_ love.


End file.
